Month: July 2014

SLU101. An amazing experience. Today, I am going to give all of y’all just a tiny idea of how truly amazing this leadership conference is. I loved how they gave us the tools to learn to be godly leaders in our homes, community, and the world. First off, the founder of SLU – Dr. Jay Strack – spoke many times during the week. Below are some of my favorite pieces of his advice and “speech”:

“The most popular symbol of excellence is the eagle because of its focus (to concentrate on what matters most), faithfulness, and stamina (the ability to keep going even when you don’t feel like it) to finish. When everything else starts to head for cover, eagles begin to soar. Eagles fly higher and faster during the storm.” “Excellence: to rise above; to soar.” “Excellence is an attitude.” “A dream is three little words…just imagine if.” “Vision is a dream with a direction.” “A goal is a detailed dream with direction, dedication, and a deadline.”

Another speaker that spoke frequently during the week, was Dr. Brent Crowe. As I did with Dr. Jay Strack, here are some of my favorite parts of what he taught and challenged during the four days:

(He was talking about components of the leadership journey, and one of those was “see the big picture.” This is in reference to that thought.) “It means to see the entire city and not just one house.” (Another component of the leadership journey was to “see further down the road.”) “I must dig a well now before I am thirsty.” “God did NOT create me infinitely valuable just to survive.” “If you really understand grace, then there are no excuses.” “Imagination: the use of creative energy within the contexts of God’s creation to fulfill God’s purpose.”

Another person who spoke was Mark Miller – the vice – president of Chick-fi-la. Here are a few things he said that I liked:

“Very few leaders fail because they don’t have skills.” “Leadership always begins with a picture of the future.”

Chuck Allen, was another speaker. Below are a couple of the things he said that I liked:

“If you can’t learn to manage, you can’t learn to lead.” “The third essential tool for time and goal management is a prioritized task list.”

There were a few more speakers, and MUCH more wonderful information, wisdom, and advice that they gave us. I strongly suggest to anyone who desires to be a godly leader to go to this leadership conference! I promise you will not regret it! I myself, have taken what I learned there and put it into action the best I can. It is a very encouraging conference to go to, and what you will learn there is priceless. Below is SLU’s website…I hope y’all will take the time to consider going to this!

This summer, through my youth group, I heard of a leadership camp. It was called Student Leadership University, or in other words, SLU101. I asked a couple of people I knew about it, and they all had wonderful things to say regarding their experience there. So I decided to sign on up and go to it with my youth group! And WOW. It was A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.

We drove on down to Orlando, which was where it was being held. July seventh, a Monday, was the very first day of the conference. We had our first session at 4:00pm by Dr. Jay Strack. At 6:00pm we ate dinner, and it was great! We had an appetizer, main course, and a dessert! Our next session started at 7:00pm and Dr. Brent Crowe was the speaker this time. By 9:00pm the sessions were over, and we all went back up to our hotel rooms. It had been an awesome first day!

We were all especially excited the next day because we would be going to…SeaWorld! While at SeaWorld, we had two sessions – one by Dr. Brent Crowe, and another by Dr. Jay Strack. Between those two sessions though, we were able to do a lot of fun things! One of our first activities was to ride the Manta, a rollercoaster. A few of us, however, were not exactly keen on the idea of riding the Manta. So, while everyone else did that, we went into an aquarium. Here are some of the pics from that:

I’m the one on the left 🙂

Next, we had our first session with Dr. Brent Crowe. After that was finished, we went and were walking to our next activity when we saw…flamingos on the pavement!

It was so funny to see them just walking around! Next, we went to see a show! It was really cool! This was the “set up”:

They had something like acrobats and some dolphins did really cool tricks!

We did a couple of more things, but the show was definitely my favorite activity that we did! At around 2:00pm we left SeaWorld. We had two more sessions before the day was over – one by the Vice President of Chick-fi-la, and the other by Dr. Jay Strack.

The second day we were going to Universal, but we did not leave until 2:00pm. We had three sessions before we left for Universal – one by Dr. Brent Crowe, another by Sean McDowell, and the last one by Dr. Brent Crowe. When we got to Universal, it actually started to rain…hard. So, for about the first two hours we just did inside rides. I’m not a big rollercoaster fan, and two of the other girls weren’t either, so we just went to Dr. Suess land! 🙂 I love seeing how they create what the imagination of people has conjured up into reality! It’s really cool!

We went on the carousel and this cute little ride inside. 🙂 After a couple of more hours, it was time to eat dinner! So we went and ate at the Hard Rock Café! It was really fun! We left the park at about 9:00pm.

Thursday was the last day of the conference, and we had three sessions that day – one by Pat Williams, another by Chuck Allen, and the last one by Dr. Jay Strack.

Overall, it was an awesome experience and I can not wait to go to SLU201 next year! In my next blog post, I’ll give y’all some of the wisdom and information I learned while there.

I am so incredibly thankful for the wondrous freedom we are able to have! We are so blessed to be able to say we live in a free country and I never want to take that for granted!

I want to start out by thanking people who are in or were in the army/military/navy/etc…THANK YOU SO MUCH! It is because of all of y’all that we can still have our freedom! So thank y’all so much! God bless all of you!

I also, would like to remind us all, of our Founding Fathers. I think it is so important for us to remember where we came from – the good, the bad, and the ugly. History sometimes isn’t pretty and sometimes it is; yet rather it be one or the other, we should learn it for what it is, not what others want us to think it is.

Here are some quotes by our Founding Fathers and my thoughts on them:

“If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent may we be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” – George Washington

This is extremely important. People should be able to say what they believe without being bullied.

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” – Thomas Jefferson

Ditto what I said earlier. People in this day and age get offended so easily. Not always, but in many cases, people today freak out if you have an opinion different than theirs. Sometimes, they even go to the extreme that if you don’t agree with them, then you must hate them. How ridiculous! If our Founding Fathers had, had that attitude there would be no United States of America!

“Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” – James Madison

Now, I understand that we do not want shootings to happen. I don’t either. However, I would suggest that there is a deeper issue here than just gun control. I would suggest that this is a heart issue not a gun issue. If we address the real reason for what causes these incidents, then I believe the shootings will lessen. If we just observe what is on the surface, we will never fix the real problem.

Last week, starting on Monday morning, I helped with VBS – which stands for Vacation Bible School. Agency D3 was the theme for this year, and the symbol D3 stood for the words DISCOVER, DECIDE, DEFEND. It was all about discovering your faith, deciding what to do with your faith, and then lastly, defending your faith. I think this is such an important skill for all believers to learn, and so I thought it was great that they were starting out doing this with such a young age group!

The group I aided in teaching and taking care of were the four year olds. They were adorable! We had ten children the first day, eleven the next, and by day four we had twelve!

It was so cute to see their responses when we would ask them questions! Not all of them, but most of them, whenever we would ask a question over the Bible story we had just read to them, would just shout, “Jesus! Jesus!” 🙂

The volunteers/teachers had to be at the church by 8:45am and then VBS would start at 9am. First all the age groups would be together, and we would sing about 2 songs. After that everyone went back to their individual rooms. From then on everyone’s schedules were different.

I really enjoyed helping with the little ones and VBS this week! I think I’ll definitely help again next year! 🙂